Baskett Michael. The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (ENG)

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102 the attractive empire

Flag!, especially How Green Was My Valley, which introduced him to pan-focus

and supplied the subplot of the little boy Tony who was crippled by ﬂ eeing Ameri-

can soldiers.

Funny Foreigners

For most Japanese, the South Seas represented the polar opposite of Japanese re-

ality. From its people and customs, to its climate and topography, the South Seas

appeared so different that it often was the butt of Japanese jokes. Essentially, Japa-

nese audiences assumed a backwardness there that was fundamentally different

from the backwardness they felt characterized China. At least with the Chinese

and Koreans of East Asia, Japan could claim a shared race and culture. When

it came to the various races of Southeast Asia, however, many Japanese thought

the population was as foreign, perhaps even more so than that of the West. Films

encouraged caution when dealing with these lesser people, because one never

knew when they might turn violent.

Southeast Asian difference was and continues to be a source of great humor

for the Japanese. The ﬁ lm Southern Winds II is an excellent example—it tells the

story of two Japanese who will do anything for money, but who wind up being

swindled out of astronomical sums by two shifty Cambodians in a phony religious

scam. Kaseda, a Japanese adventurer, becomes friends with a Cambodian named

Shen Chip (played by the comic Japanese character actor Saito Tatsuo), who tells

him about a secret river of gold in the jungles of Cambodia. The two set out for

the river and once they ﬁ nd it, Kaseda ﬁ lls his pockets with gold sifted out of the

river bed just before he contracts malaria and forgets everything. But Kaseda is

lured by more than just the prospect of gold. He is led to believe that the leader

of the local cult to which Shen Chip belongs and which is also connected to the

gold, is in fact the illegitimate son of the famous Meiji era Japanese general, Saigo

Takamori. This is why Kaseda and Munekata bring the two to Tokyo and initially

treat them with such deference. In terms of genre, South Winds II is not strictly

a comedy per se, but its representation of non-Japanese characters depends on

Japanese assumptions about the people and cultures of the South Seas as being

comic, odd, and irretrievably foreign.

Shen agrees to tell Kaseda where the river is on condition that Kaseda take

Shen and Nekku Soi (played by Japanese actor Kawamura Reikichi), the cult’s

leader, to Tokyo and establish a branch there. Kaseda lets his friend Munekata in

on the deal, and Munekata invests his wealthy family’s estate in the church. Once

in Japan, the Japanese immigration ofﬁ ce and the police detain Nekku Soi and

Shen Chip on suspicion of having dangerous beliefs, and they soon uncover that

Nekku Soi is too young to be related to Saigo in any way. Things ﬁ nally come to

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imperial acts 103

a head in the following scene, when Kaseda explains the scam to Munekata, with

Shen and Nekku, now in custody, in the room.

K: This guy [Shen] doesn’t even know what’s true and what’s an illusion! He

really believes his own lies! I can’t ﬁ gure him out!

S: But I ﬁ gure myself out well. I am messenger of god.

K: Messenger? Why did you make up all those stories about Saigo? What

was that?

S: I deen’t do that! I be tricked by Nekku Soi. This man bad! Just look!

(Nekku Soi grinds a ﬁ nger into his nostril, absently looking at the ceiling,

checks it, and continues.)

M: Didn’t you know he’s too young to be Saigo’s son?

K: How was I supposed to know? I can’t tell how old people with skin that

black are! Even the police got a laugh at that! (to Shen) You’d better re-

member your promise.

S: Promise . . . ah . . . hmm . . . what that?

K: The mining rights to Kongkamenam River! What do you think?

S: Ah, ﬁ ne, ﬁ ne. I can give you ANY-time. (puzzled) But . . . why?

K: Wh-? To mine for gold, what else? How do you think we’ll get his money

back?

S: Gold? Oh no, none of that there.

K: Wh-what d’ya mean ‘none of that?’ You and I found some, didn’t we!

S: Illusion! Only illusion. (wags ﬁ nger) tsk, tsk, tsk . . . you same like me . . .

illusion, true . . . you make same!

K: Whaaat illusion? Look, we went on a tough journey didn’t we?

S: True! We go Laos from Daso into mountains: true! You stay at chief’s

house, we go Kongkamenam River: true!

K: Well, then, all of it’s true!

S: You . . . me . . . scoop river water: true! But only sand . . .

K: Wait a minute, I really did ﬁ nd gold. I remember . . . chunks this big . . .

S: Illusion! Only illusion. You get malaria, very bad. Sometimes in sleep at

chief’s house you say such things. But then pass out . . . big fever . . . barf

everywhere. I think maybe you die . . . very pity . . . Malaria bring such

big fever.

K: T-Then you took advantage of me! You tricked me! And I trusted you!

S: (angrily) I deen’t trick! You out of you mind!

K: Out of my . . . ? Why you little son of a— (Kaseda grabs Shen violently)

S: No angry, No angry! All for god, all for Hong Tai Kyo. (Praying) Tonrong

Saya . . .

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104 the attractive empire

The comic timing in this scene is reminiscent of traditional comic narratives

such as rakugo and manzai. Stylistically, manzai stands out for its rapid-ﬁ re ex-

change of dialogue between the two principals—the boke (straight man) and the

tsukomi (comic foil)—each feed the other their lines to bring the brisk conversa-

tion around to a predictable punch line. The punch line usually depends on

puns, wordplay, and physical slapstick to sell the joke. As in traditional manzai,

this scene has a boke (Kaseda) and a tsukomi (Shen), and the humor is fueled to

a large degree on mimicry and imitation. Few ﬁ lms of this period blend the con-

cept of the foreign/er so naturally into the comic rhythm of the narrative. Shen

Chip successfully takes advantage of two Japanese who should know better. The

fact that he successfully makes off with a bundle in cash sets this storyline apart

from the typical fare.

Saito Tatsuo’s performance in brownface,

buck teeth, native clothes, exces-

sive gestures and linguistic foibles identify him as an instantly recognizable south-

ern type. Film magazine readers were aware of the fact that Saito had actually

lived in Singapore for many years from the time he was a teenager, a fact that

contributes to his believability as a non-Japanese. Saito plays the part for laughs;

by this time he was already an experienced character actor who had starred in

dozens of comedies, often playing characters of different ethnicities. An article in

the wartime ﬁ lm magazine Film stated that Saito was careful to “bring complete

authenticity to his role.” The article continued its praise of Saito, raving that

even his incantations and prayers were spoken in actual Malaysian.

The fact

that Saito’s character is supposed to be Cambodian seems to have escaped the

notice of both the reviewer and Saito. Saito told the author he had remade his

false buck teeth twice so that they were “just right,” and his skirt was a gift from

his father, who had purchased it while in the South Seas. Even his hat (which

hardly appears in the ﬁ lm) was a treasured possession from those years. All of this

illustrates that he did not simply ad-lib his performance but crafted a carefully

thought-out representation.

The performances of Shen Chip and Nekku Soi highlight the duality in Japa-

nese representations of the South Seas and its people, as both funny and weird.

When Shen Chip and Nekku Soi return to Munekata’s house from the police sta-

tion, the maid, seeing Shen Chip’s face, screams and drops her tray. After the scene

is over, Munekata calls the maid to show them to their rooms, but a different maid

appears. When Munekata asks where the ﬁ rst maid went, he is told: “Oh, she’s

right here.” Munekata sees her obvious aversion at Shen Chip’s appearance and

says: “So you brought a bodyguard, did you?” As Shen Chip passes her, he gives

a lecherous laugh that sends the young maid screaming down the hall. As these

sequences were not in the original script, we can only assume they were added

sometime during the shooting. They intriguingly illustrate representations of the

foreign, especially the South Seas, in the Japanese imperialist imagination.

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imperial acts 105

Returning to Munekata and Kaseda, it is interesting to note that as late as 1942

these hucksters could still ﬁ nd a place onscreen. Fleecing people of their money

is not something that a proper imperial Japanese subject would do, which may

explain why the perpetrators in this ﬁ lm had to be foreign. Still, after the scam

is revealed, Munekata and Kaseda are depicted as being sadder but wiser, and

slightly more suspect of foreign hucksters. But rather than stay in Japan and work

to pay back the money, the two decide to return to Cambodia. Again, the impe-

rial space of the South Seas is represented as both haven and place of last resort.

For it is here that the two can go to forget, rather than remember, the Japanese

home islands: “Let’s ﬁ nd ourselves a better place. Let’s go south . . . down to the

Nanyo. We’ll let the southern blood ﬂ owing through our veins go wild. I tell you,

if we stick around here, we’re ﬁ nished. C’mon, let’s make our dreams come true.

They say if life knocks you down seven times, get up eight.”

Japanese ﬁ lms represented the South Seas as being as geographically distant

from the Japanese home islands as it was topographically different. Symbolized by

descriptions of torrid heat, unusual (to Japanese) plants, and sickness, the South

Seas was at once the Southern paradise that Munekata seeks in Southern Winds

II as well as the torrid inferno infested with con men and malaria that Kaseda

experienced. The landscape of the South Seas was an imperial hinterland whose

ﬁ lm representations found parallels in Japanese literature that also emphasized

the region’s blistering heat and native corporeality.

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chapter four

Competing Empires in

Transnational Asia

Japanese ideologues and ﬁ lmmakers realized that ethnic and cultural divisions

within Japan’s empire were not the only challenges facing its campaign for cul-

tural hegemony in Asia; competition with the United States, Germany, France,

and other nations with long-held ambitions in Asia were a constant source of

concern. Japan gained and maintained its Asian empire vis-à-vis two different

Western colonial forces. On the one side, Japan clashed with Hollywood for mar-

ket domination of Asia, and the ascendancy of Japanese imperial power in Asia

threatened American ﬁ lm dominance there, leading to a ﬁ lm war. Japan ini-

tially restricted access to Asian markets under its control by censoring or banning

American ﬁ lms and ﬁ nally placed a comprehensive embargo on all Hollywood

ﬁ lms. These actions eventually led to a clandestine meeting between representa-

tives of the Japanese ﬁ lm industry, Hollywood, and the U.S. Department of Com-

merce to discuss the opening of Japan’s imperial markets to American ﬁ lms.

At the same time Japan attempted to maintain its Asian hegemony through

legislation, distribution, and exhibition during its alliance with Nazi Germany

and Fascist Italy in the early 1940s. Film scholarship often neglects such areas as

distribution and exhibition, but examining how audience tastes were both per-

ceived and shaped on the local level reveals what a tremendous impact they had

on imperial Japanese ﬁ lm culture. Even before Pearl Harbor and the embargo

of American ﬁ lms, Japanese distributors and exhibitors were importing colonial-

themed ﬁ lms from Italy, Germany, and France, suggesting that the notion of

empire sold ﬁ lms. At a time when imperial Japanese rhetoric was growing increas-

ingly anti-Western, the popularity of foreign colonial ﬁ lms in Japan should shock

us. What this illustrates, however, is that imperial Japanese ﬁ lm culture did not

exist in isolation but was part of an international fraternity of ﬁ lm imperialists.

Even if the Japanese government ofﬁ cially supported the importation of Axis

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competing empires in transnational asia 107

ﬁ lms in a show of solidarity, distributors still had to select which ﬁ lms the market

would support. That they chose colonial-themed ﬁ lms over other genres was

a business decision that suggests the distributors considered more than ofﬁ cial

policy; they knew there was an audience for ﬁ lms about empire.

Empire-Building: Hollywood vs. Imperial Japan

Imperial Japan’s eventual domination of Asia’s ﬁ lm markets was never a foregone

conclusion. From the 1910s, Hollywood ﬁ lm studios in Asia were actively displac-

ing French ﬁ lm companies such as Lumière and Pathé to establish their own vast

distribution network, which covered every major Asian territory from Japan to

India. Asia’s markets were much smaller than those of Great Britain, Europe, or

Canada, but Asian markets were not insigniﬁ cant, and Hollywood maintained its

presence there because throughout the 1920s Hollywood grew ever more depen-

dant on the revenue from overseas receipts. By the late 1920s most of the world’s

leading nations recognized the importance of ﬁ lm in communicating political

and ideological power. With the coming of sound, nations across the globe in-

creasingly saw ﬁ lms as potent expressions of ideological and literal power.

The maxim that “ﬁ lm followed the ﬂ ag” expressed the interdependency of ﬁ lm

and government. Hollywood had the “structural, entrepreneurial, and ﬁ nancial

advantages of U.S. ﬁ rms, combined with the experience gained from catering to

a diverse domestic audience.”

For many in the American ﬁ lm industry, the mar-

riage of government and industry seemed not only divine but foreordained. As

early as 1918 American ﬁ lm trades were talking about the inevitability of America

dominating world ﬁ lm:

We shall have to work for some sort of cooperative scheme by which each

nation will supply the world the things which it is best suited to produce. Just

as America is called upon to feed the world because of our abundance of all

sorts of foodstuffs, so it will naturally fall to our lot to supply the bulk of the

motion pictures as this is one of our national specialties.

When The Moving Picture World published this blurb, few Americans probably

saw their ﬁ lm industry as an empire. The unshakable belief that U.S. expansion

into and domination of the world’s ﬁ lm markets was an inalienable American

right was, however, exactly what empire was all about. As the Japanese empire

steadily expanded militarily into most of East Asia, Hollywood aggressively oc-

cupied Asia’s ﬁ lm markets. With the exception of the Japanese domestic market,

Hollywood ﬁ lms accounted for 50 to 90 percent of all the ﬁ lms screened in Asia

through the 1930s.

It is no wonder, then, that the leading American ﬁ lm com-

panies referred to themselves as ﬁ lm empires possessing ﬁ lm colonies in smaller

markets. Media critics have noted that even the spinning globe logos used by ﬁ lm

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108 the attractive empire

companies throughout the world indicate evidence of the expansionist aspirations

of ﬁ lm studios.

United Artists (UA), one of America’s largest ﬁ lm distribution companies, is

perhaps exemplary; after initially setting up a branch ofﬁ ce in Tokyo, UA soon

spread to Shanghai, Calcutta, Singapore, the Philippines, and Jakarta.

United

Artists executives wanted to keep in close contact with the markets in Asia and

chose Tokyo for two reasons—ﬁ rst, it was the most lucrative ﬁ lm market in Asia,

and second, it had the worst ﬁ lm piracy record in all of Asia.

America’s domestic market virtually assured its ﬁ lm industry of recouping

production costs, thereby relieving it of dependence on income from overseas

markets initially. This tremendous advantage enabled Hollywood to undersell

competitors in such Asian markets as the Dutch East Indies, Ceylon, or the Phil-

ippines. In this way, America managed to consolidate its share of local markets by

dumping its ﬁ lms at rental rates far below those in other territories.

By 1931 it became clear for two reasons that imperial Japan and Hollywood

were on a collision course. The Manchurian Incident brought Hollywood face

to face with the possible loss of lucrative ﬁ lm markets in Asia (including the

domestic Japanese market) due to Japan’s expanding military presence. And the

coming of American talking movies to Japan forced many in the ﬁ lm industry

and government there to pay attention to what Hollywood was saying. Both sides

viewed the other as a potentially hostile force in what each considered their own

market. While American ﬁ lm companies acted as if expansion into the world’s

ﬁ lm market was their right, leaders in imperial Japan increasingly saw this sort of

expansionism as a threat that posed potentially lethal industrial and ideological

problems. Thus any move on the part of the Japanese ﬁ lm industry to displace

Hollywood from the markets of Asia—either independently or in cooperation

with the government—was couched in nationalistic language that justiﬁ ed its

actions as necessary to protect or liberate Asia from Western domination. After

the China Incident of 1937, Japanese ﬁ lm journals decried the ideological threat

that American ﬁ lms posed in such articles as “The Inﬂ uence of American Films

in Asia.” Japanese ﬁ lmmakers grew increasingly worried that Hollywood might

have already won the hearts and minds of its Asian brothers and sisters.

Their

ﬁ rst response was to underplay the inﬂ uence of the Americans on local Asian

audiences.

In 1940 Tsuji Hisaichi, Shanghai Communications Division attaché with the

Imperial Japanese Army, cautioned Japanese readers not to overestimate the in-

ﬂ uence of American ﬁ lm in China:

The distance between Western ﬁ lms and the average people is immense.

The ﬁ rst problem is that we can’t understand the language. Even with

Chinese subtitles, the illiterate are left on their own. Of course far more

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competing empires in transnational asia 109

Shanghai Chinese speak English than we Japanese . . . and many more

people in China understand English and see Western ﬁ lms. But their inﬂ u-

ence is exceedingly superﬁ cial . . . and on that point the Chinese people

most stubbornly protect their own ethnic character. Western ﬁ lms merely

ﬂ oat around the top far from the [cultural] base.

Tsuji and other Japanese ﬁ lm critics thought that Chinese audiences wanted

only meaningless entertainment ﬁ lms, the type Hollywood was known for, and

thought they resisted ﬁ lms that required deeper thought. Japanese critics were

puzzled why Asian audiences would prefer ﬁ lms with Caucasian actors to ones

with Japanese. Initially, Japanese critics became self-critical. Tsuji even went so

far as to say that Japanese ﬁ lms contained “nothing you could remotely call inﬂ u-

ence” on the Chinese, and that they lacked “any appeal whatsoever” for the Chi-

nese. But Japanese critics soon reasoned that Asian audiences could differentiate

among Japanese ﬁ lms by recognizing their educational value. Japanese ﬁ lmmak-

ers produced ﬁ lms to educate the Chinese on how to understand, hence appreci-

ate, Japanese culture, thinking that this would beat Hollywood without resorting

to making the same low-brow entertainment ﬁ lms the Americans were.

Understanding each other’s culture was a key concept to the initial construc-

tion of Japan’s new ﬁ lm order. Tsuji concluded that the Chinese lacked interest in

Japanese ﬁ lms because the Japanese in turn refused to watch Chinese ﬁ lms, call-

ing them “worthless.”

Even if Tsuji’s position is an overstatement, it establishes

the fact that regardless of their supposed lack of popularity, at least some Chi-

nese audiences were watching Japanese ﬁ lms. Japanese distributors working with

government ofﬁ cials took the position that it was crucial to expose the Chinese

populace to as many Japanese ﬁ lms as possible. To that end Japanese traveling

projection units spread across the Chinese interior, Shanghai, and Hong Kong,

screening Japanese ﬁ lms. By the 1940s more Japanese ﬁ lms were shown in China

than ﬁ lms from any other nation. Although the target audience for these ﬁ lms

was primarily Japanese, Chinese did attend screenings, and their presence cannot

be entirely ascribed to simple coercion.

Each Japanese military victory in Asia signiﬁ cantly diminished the U.S. ﬁ lm

presence in that area, which spurred worries in the U.S. government about what

adverse ideological effects Japan’s increased ﬁ lm activities might have on their

Chinese allies. After the fall of Hong Kong in 1941, the Japanese immediately

began screening Japanese ﬁ lms to Chinese audiences. A 1943 U.S. consular re-

port took very seriously the effect of such Japanese ﬁ lms, warning:

We need not be gifted with very active imaginations to form a fair idea of

the extent of the impact of such pictures on the mind of a half-illiterate

dockyard worker or shop-runner for whom an infrequent visit to a “garden

of the electric shadows” is an important adventure in an otherwise very

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110 the attractive empire

restricted life. And for the Chinese of education and sensitivity, who had

put so much faith in his Western learning and his Western friends, the total

effect of the constantly repeated shock could only have been just that much

more profound.

The situation in China was not that different from other markets such as Singa-

pore, Thailand, and the Philippines, where U.S. ﬁ lms dominated until the early

1940s.

Japan had protected its domestic ﬁ lm market against foreign domina-

tion through strict import and censorship restrictions starting in the late teens,

which partially explains why American ﬁ lms never enjoyed the same percentage

of market penetration in Japan as they did elsewhere in Asia. The Japanese gov-

ernment also actively banned American ﬁ lms and lodged formal complaints with

the American government to forbid the exhibition of Hollywood ﬁ lms deemed

offensive to Japanese national pride.

Japanese were not alone in their fear of a Hollywood takeover. Chinese ﬁ lm

critics like Hong Sheng also wrote about the American ﬁ lm threat: “Shall we wait

until American capital has completely taken over the Chinese ﬁ lm industry? Will

imperialism not try to maintain its position by attempting to crush the rebellious

spirit of those who are oppressed? Will we even remember how to make anti-

imperialist ﬁ lms, or ﬁ lms about social revolution, or even patriotic ﬁ lms? Should

this happen, we will have sealed our own fate and delivered the fatal weapon

into another’s hands. Each theater will be a site where slaves are raised, and one

meekly defers to their domination and oppression.”

Government and ﬁ lm industry leaders in Japan recognized a link between

Hollywood’s presence in Asia—especially China—and its Orientalist representa-

tions of Asia onscreen. By the 1930s Hollywood took an increasingly paternal,

expansionist interest in China as illustrated by such ﬁ lms as Oil for the Lamps of

China (1935), The Good Earth (1937), and The Dragon Seed (1944).

Oil for the

Lamps of China is especially intriguing because it illustrates how easily narratives

about American business expanding into China blended with Hollywood’s own

sense of Manifest Destiny to rule the world’s ﬁ lm markets. Based on the best-

selling 1934 novel by Alice Tisdale Hobart, Oil for the Lamps is set almost entirely

in China and tells the story of a large American oil conglomerate that demands

absolute loyalty from its employees. In the opening scene a group of American oil

salesmen are completing their training in New York. Their instructor gives them

some ﬁ nal advice before being sending them to China, concisely explaining the

purpose of their mission: “The company is sending you out to China to dispel

the darkness of centuries with the light of a new era; oil for the lamps of China,

gentlemen—American oil. Helping to build a great corporation . . . extend the

frontier of civilization is a great ideal. You will have hardships, you will encounter

dangers and you will be thwarted time and time again by foreign traditions and

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competing empires in transnational asia 111

the logic of the Orient. Your ideals must remain progressive, American. But you

must learn to think like a Chinese.”

Here we see how close the language of Japan’s and Hollywood’s competing

imperialisms in Asia truly was. Japanese construction ﬁ lms like Vow in the Desert

(1940) use exactly the same metaphors of light and darkness to explain the impe-

rial landscape. Oil for the Lamps of China associates progress with modernity and

casts (Chinese) tradition as either mysterious or regressive. In the ﬁ lm, American

oil salesmen are backed by a company that functions as a substitute for the na-

tion. The company code becomes a mantra repeated throughout this ﬁ lm: “the

company takes care of its own.” But in actuality, the company proves to be heart-

less. It betrays the protagonist’s trust on several occasions despite the fact that

he sacriﬁ ces his wife’s health and even his child’s life for the company. Whereas

the book offers a scathing indictment of the oil industry, the ﬁ lm reduces its so-

cial criticism to one man’s struggle against adversity (in China as well as within

American corporate culture).

Film Threats into Film War

Friction between Japan and Hollywood came to a head in 1937 when Japan lev-

ied import restrictions on American ﬁ lms both in the domestic Japanese market

and all of its imperial possessions. In one year the number of American ﬁ lms

imported into Japan dropped by half, from 295 ﬁ lms in 1937 to 144 ﬁ lms in 1938.

This move angered both the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Associa-

tion (MPPDA) and the U.S. government. American consular records reveal meet-

ings among several representatives from MPPDA, a United States consul general,

and several Japanese government ofﬁ cials in an undisclosed location in Tokyo.

The Americans asked the Japanese whether they felt a “sense of danger” over

what might happen to them should they continue to ban American ﬁ lm products

from Asia. The Americans handed the Japanese authorities an ultimatum that

might have been taken straight from any Hollywood gangster ﬁ lm.

Almost every plot must have a villain, and American producers ﬁ nd it dif-

ﬁ cult to discover a suitable nationality for such villains, encountering violent

opposition which sometimes results in the exclusion or boycott of ﬁ lms with

consequent ﬁ nancial losses . . . so that for the present a disproportionately

large percentage of movie villains and characters arousing feelings of resent-

ment are American. Should the producing companies decide that some one

country is determined to rule them out entirely so that resentment as to vil-

lains from that particular country would not diminish the ﬁ nancial returns

of their ﬁ lms, they might consider it an opportunity.

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